Humoring the Context, Contextualizing Humor in the Short Fiction of Lorrie Moore

Volume 2 Issue 3 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND December 2015 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Humoring the Context, Contextualizing Humor in the Short Fiction of Lorrie Moore Nadia Boudidah Falfoul University of Monastir, Tunisia Abstract Talking about the revolutionary power of women's laughter, Jo Anna Isaak affirms that “the crisis of authority and value,” that is symptomatic of postmodernism, has been “instigated largely by a feminist deployment of laughter.” Since the 1980s, women’s humor discourse has become part of a rapidly growing corpus of works by contemporary writers who engage a wide variety of comic techniques in order to explore alternative forms of resistance to mechanisms of control and containment. The argument behind this paper is to show how the American short story writer, Lorrie Moore (b- 1957) uses humor as a subversive tool, a way of confronting tragedy and a vehicle to critique various psychological, social, and political issues about women’s lives. Her collections of short stories, namely Self-Help (1985), Like-Life (1990), Birds of America (1998), and The Collected Stories (2008), provide alternate ways of thinking about the humorous texts by examining their contexts—not just their contents. Analysed contextually, Moore’s “comic” stories emerge as forms of human communication whose con/textual implications are startling, engaging, and profound. Keywords: postmodern short story, women's humor, comic narrative, subversive humor, contextualized humor, female identity. http://ijhcschiefeditor.wix.com/ijhcs Page 293 Volume 2 Issue 3 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND December 2015 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 “We are losing our sense of humor…the last thing to be lost, after hope.” Luisa Valenzuala In her introduction to The Signet Book of American Humor, Regina Barreca, a leading theorist in the field of humor, argues that “women’s comic stories subvert the condition traditionally regarded as a prerequisite for humorous narrative: the assumption of a consensus-opinion or shared values.” According to Barreca, the word “humor” as distinguished from “comedy,” applies to “those specific textual strategies where the refusal to take serious matters seriously is rendered explicit” (2). The best American humor that women can produce, Barreca explains “isn’t about jokes, it’s about stories.” Women’s humor is about “our vision of life, loss, refusal, and recovery” (xxi). Like all forms of communication, humor requires a context: Almost every detail of our lives affects the way we create and respond to humor. Indeed, out of all the textual territories explored, comedy, as Barreca claims in her book Untamed and Unabashed, is “the least universal” because it is “rigidly mapped and marked by subjectivity.” It is most liable to be “filtered” by history, social class, age, race, ethnicity, and of course gender (12). Women have a tradition of using humor to survive what is often a hostile environment. In most cultures, women were outside the locus of power and authority; they were not allowed the capacity of humor, with its implications of superiority and its fundamental critique of social, political, and cultural reality. Recently, however, feminist critics have evolved more complex ways of analyzing the relationship between women and laughter. In its most radical function, women’s laughter attempts destruction, as Hélène Cixous describes in “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic.” In fact, many women writers use humor to disrupt, unsettle, and rebel against patriarchal and cultural constrictions on women’s lives. By using the medium of the humorous discourse, many contemporary American women writers of fiction present their perceptions of and commentary on contemporary culture. Their humor functions both as a technique for questioning basic assumptions, and a tactic of cultural as well as textual resistance. “It’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (Cixoux 258). Thus, humor, for these writers, contains a diversity of elements and calls for a complex response. Women writers of humor subvert the authoritative discourse by presenting a multiplicity of ways that humor can mean. Their wit has always been a carefully executed writing strategy used to shape and control their fiction. Refusal is at the heart of such works, which carry powerful messages of dissent. In their narratives, the main character often learns to distrust and to refuse to participate in the system of shared values. This process, as feminist writers and critics maintain, disrupts and rebuilds, destroys and creates simultaneously. Hence, women’s humor is often elusive, evasive, and subversive. It focuses mainly on the female experience, and centers round such themes as feeling trapped, anger as projected outward and inward, and the quest for freedom, identity, power, and self-expression. In her fiction, American short story writer, Lorrie Moore (b-1957) offers her readers a comic and decidedly dark catharsis. Her books unfold a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the http://ijhcschiefeditor.wix.com/ijhcs Page 294 Volume 2 Issue 3 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND December 2015 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 unhinged, the lost, and the unsettled of American society. They tell varied stories about sadness, crisis and death. Lorrie Moore, considered by many critics as the best voice of her generation, is admired for her biting glances at American culture as she seems to be almost exclusively fascinated with broken, suffering and depressed people. Accordingly, her adroit portraits of places and people reflect her overarching artistic purpose, which she had described as “trying to register the way we, here in America, live” (2008). In fact, her characters’ personal dramas are enacted against a recognizably American backdrop made up of a multitude of details, allusions, and conversations (Vietnam War, Gulf War, 9/11 attack, etc). Throughout her work, it is apparent that her dark humor, and the pain it masks, is part of her intense contemplation of contemporary existence. Besides, her characters and narrators use comic expressions, jokes, and an entire collection of humorous effects to amplify, underline, and sharpen the points they make. Writing humorously can be an act of survival and self-empowerment, a new power for women through their manipulation of literary language. Employing insights from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and cultural criticism, Moore’s short fiction can be analyzed as a “comic” examination of futility and desperation, where humor operates largely to contextualize the issues and emotions that are explored in each story without the mawkishness that frequently pervades “problem” fiction. In her first collection, Self-Help, published in 1985, Moore probes the pleasures and pains of modern relationships, offering poignant yet wickedly funny advice on how to survive several psychological crises of loss and love. In nine captivating stories, the author presents characters that will become typical in her work: individuals, usually women, who are sarcastic, witty, and secretly vulnerable. The title of the collection—“Self-Help” reflects the idea behind it: to adapt the prolific American self-help literature designed “to coach readers in self-fulfillment and good management of careers, love affairs, marriages, and family relationships” (Alison Kelly Understanding Lorrie Moore 21). All the stories in this collection offer sarcastic commentaries on the 1980s trend of books on self-improvement, sexual guidance, and popular psychology. Moore’s reworking of the genre is, of course, ironic and parodic, and much of the “putative advice dispensed by her narrators is highly subversive” (Kelly 21). Thus, various female characters in this collection mimic certain cultural scripts that have confined them: horoscopes, advice columns, advertisement, and recipes. Their voice mocks the clichés of the cultural script even while it repeats it, thus generating a kind of “hysteria of resistance”. In these stories oppressive contexts and restrictive values would be ridiculed, rather than the characters who are struggling against such restrictions. In this collection Moore advises on “How to Be an Other Woman,” “How to Talk to Your Mother,” “How to Become a Writer,” and even simply “How,” a title that leaves the focus of its advice open. Irony pervades the narrator’s tone and story line: the narrators are supposed to be addressing themselves, but after a while it's hard not to feel that it is the reader who is being hectored. In “How to Be an Other Woman,” Moore’s first story in Self-Help, the style is modeled on an instruction manual, filled with lists and witty snatches of dialogue. The protagonist, a smart, single woman is “technically... still a secretary for Karma-Kola,” but she wonders repeatedly who she is as she becomes enmeshed in an affair with a married man who seems to be completely ignorant or unaware of the complexity of emotions that a woman might experience in such a frail http://ijhcschiefeditor.wix.com/ijhcs Page 295 Volume 2 Issue 3 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND December 2015 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 relationship. The story is written in the imperative: “Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea- soupy night… Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.” Later, in her description of a love encounter between the protagonist and her married lover, the narrator uses a language brimming with irony and sarcastic humor: He tells you his wife's name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, “How do you feel about that?” don't say “Ridiculous” or “Get the hell out of my apartment.” Prop your head up with one hand and say: “It depends. What is intellectual property law?” (4) The same style is employed in several other scenes in the story, displaying a distanced, ironic narration in sharp contrast with the emotional upheaval of the events being narrated.

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